Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, appeared at a news conference this week at a factory in Kitchener, Ontario, with an unusual prop: a crown-shaped bottle of whisky.
After making his announcement about a job skills training program, Mr. Ford said that although he does not drink alcohol, he had found the bottle of Crown Royal in his home. As he uncapped it and began pouring out its contents, Mr. Ford launched into an attack against Diageo, the global alcohol giant, for its decision to move Crown Royal’s bottling from Amherstburg, Ontario, to a plant in the United States.
“This is what I think about Crown Royal,” said Mr. Ford, who appeared surprised by how sluggishly the bottle was emptying because of its narrow neck. “Everyone else should do the same thing — start supporting companies that make whisky here by Ontario people.”
He also suggested that he might go further than emptying bottles.
“You hurt my people, I’m going to hurt you,” he warned Diageo.
Early in the current trade war with the United States, Mr. Ford removed all beer, wine and liquor made in the United States from the shelves of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the government-owned retailer that is among the largest buyers of alcohol in the world.
When I asked Mr. Ford’s office if Crown Royal would similarly be purged from government liquor store shelves if the Amherstburg factory was shut as planned in February, a spokeswoman replied in an email, “Our hope is they reverse their decision and if they don’t, all options are on the table re: L.C.B.O.”
The closing of the bottling line, if it happens, would eliminate 200 union jobs at the former Seagram’s distillery in Amherstburg, which has a population of just over 15,000.
In an email, the company told me that the plan “is not a reaction to the current trade environment.”
In an earlier statement, the company said that it was “shifting some bottling volume to be closer to its many U.S. Crown Royal consumers.”
The Amherstburg factory sits directly across the Detroit River from Detroit’s southern suburbs.
The whisky itself will continue to be distilled and aged in Gimli, Manitoba, and Valleyfield, Quebec, after the shutdown, the company said. It added that Crown Royal for the Canadian market and for the rest of the world outside the United States, its biggest market, would be bottled at the Valleyfield plant. “Luxury” varieties of the whisky for the American market will also be bottled there.
(Regardless of the bottling location, regular Crown Royal no longer comes in the royal blue felt bags that long stored many Canadians’ marble collections and Scrabble tiles.)
John D’Agnolo, the president of the Unifor union local that represents the plant’s workers, said that he had been taken aback by the announcement because the company had added a third shift in Amherstburg just four months ago. He believes the plan to close the plant is directly related to President Trump’s pressuring of businesses that export products to the United States to start making them there.
After the president’s inauguration, Diageo said that it would build a new plant in Montgomery, Ala. While the company has not publicly identified where it will send Amherstburg’s work, Mr. D’Agnolo said he believed it would eventually end up at the Alabama plant.
“We thought the place was doing really well,” Mr. D’Agnolo said of the Amherstburg plant. “They employ more people than anybody in that town, and they’re well paid. It’s terrible.”
Amherstburg isn’t the only community along the Detroit River that is involved in the Canadian whisky trade.
Suntory, the Japanese alcohol giant, makes Canadian Club in Windsor at a distillery now owned by Pernod Ricard of France, which distills and bottles a number of its own brands there, including J.P. Wiser’s.
Like Crown Royal, Canadian Club is a premium whisky with its largest market share in the United States. In an email, Suntory told me that all Canadian Club whisky is bottled either in Windsor or in Calgary, at Alberta Distillers, another of its brands.
Mr. Ford said, without elaborating, that the factory closing would “jeopardize” the 740 million Canadian dollars of business the provincial liquor stores conduct with Diageo each year, although it’s unclear how much of an effect that would have on a company with sales of just over $20 billion during its last fiscal year.
Mr. D’Agnolo, the union leader, said that if the company didn’t change its mind, he wanted the government to pull not just Crown Royal from its liquor stores but also all Diageo brands, including Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Baileys.
“It shouldn’t just be Crown Royal that’s not shelved,” he said. “It should be their products — period. And they have a lot of them.”
Trans Canada
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Jesse Winter and Vjosa Isai report on how the devastation from wildfires that all but erased vast parts of Jasper National Park is being mined by researchers seeking lessons to fight future fires.
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Graham Greene, the actor whose long screen career was highlighted by an Academy Award nomination for his performance as a Lakota medicine man in the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves,” died on Monday in Stratford, Ontario. He was 73. Even after establishing himself in Hollywood, Mr. Greene found himself being pigeonholed into Indigenous roles, to his dismay.
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Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, backtracked from an order directing schools to remove books that described sex or other topics deemed inappropriate for young people. The move followed a public outcry from high-profile authors including Margaret Atwood.
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Walker Mimms writes that Ambera Wellmann, an artist originally from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, “belongs loosely to a generation of figurative artists who paint large, busy canvases that marry primordial human themes to a schizophrenia of painterly styles — a combination that reflects the horror-joys of the internet.”
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Veronika Slowikowska, a 29-year-old from Barrie, Ontario, is among a new batch of “Saturday Night Live” cast members.
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Fonki, the tag name adopted by a graffiti artist during his days in Montreal, is now in Phnom Penh exploring his Cambodian heritage.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
The post A Canadian Whisky Brand May Move Bottling to the U.S. A Union Blames Trump. appeared first on New York Times.
